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The New Yorker Has a Pretty Low Opinion of Mass Effect 3 Fans

The New Yorker doesn’t exactly have a reputation for being populist, but sort of surprisingly, it’s decided to weigh in on the controversy surrounding the Mass Effect 3 ending. Eustace Tilley has peered down his monocle, at least the blog version of his monocle, at Mass Effect fans, and he’s seen just about what anyone could have expected him to see.

Writer Taylor Clark begins by summing up the situation with the sort of nerd-bashing that’s become par-for-the course here:

While the game sold a brisk nine hundred thousand copies on its first day in stores, the blazing ardor of the series’s fans soon turned Antarctic because of its controversial ending, which drove some players to an indignant rage so fierce that the casual observer might have thought that BioWare had cut off their supply of Mountain Dew Game Fuel.

Filtering through the self-gratifying, metaphor-happy prose, the arguments that the writer is putting forward are basically the same thing that IGN and everyone else has been saying for weeks. Other art doesn’t bend to audience rage, games are art, if gamers want respect they need to stop whining, etc. and so forth. Here’s an excerpt with some particularly overblown metaphor:

Muzyka, who, in a Wednesday post on BioWare’s Web site, performed the artistic equivalent of falling to one knee and kissing the Godfather’s ring: he announced that the studio would cave to the demands of its “core fans” and revise Mass Effect 3’s ending. It’s a staggering victory for the series’s most zealous enthusiasts—and that, unfortunately, is the problem. As long as gaming’s ‘core fans’ hold such sway over major game studios, art will never have a chance.

We’ve been over this territory before, but there is a certain kind of validation in The New Yorker telling you you’re an idiot. The rebuttal argument is the same: to compare games to movies and television, you need to acknowledge that there are fundamental differences between a passive experience like a movie and an interactive experience like Mass Effect. You didn’t have this kind of outcry over The Sopranos because the viewers never wrote their own story of Tony Soprano.

The New Yorker is right – games will never get the respect they deserve unless they can own up to being the kind of art that they are. But the mistake is in thinking that when they come out of the wash and emerge as art, they will look just like the other art forms we’ve grown accustomed to. This is something new, and the Mass Effect debate is about figuring out what it is.

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It’s funny that some games media outlets are still working against the fans here despite there being a lot of info uncovered about how the devs cut corners, writers weren’t involved in the ending, Hudson admitting to jimmying the ending in order to get polarized responses, DLC, deliberate misdirection or broken promises, etc… etc… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaUTiQRI5Gk says it all about the state of games media outlets.

‘the users never wrote their own story of Tony Soprano’… And they didn’t write their own ending of Mass Effect 1, 2, or 3 either. Players are making choices on a pre-designed pachinko machine with set endings, not engaging in the ‘creative’ process in any way more meaningful that sending a letter of suggestion or complaint after the fact. Although fans did cry out against the Sopranos ending and asked for closure—Mass Effect 3’s ending outcry was exacerbated, to my mind, by four key factors. First, and most important, is the unique nature of the Mass Effect play experience that engaged players at an emotional level and gave them the impression of ‘creating’ the story. Second is the relationship the developer cultivated with their fans, demonstrating that they were receptive to their input. Third is the role DLC has played in the minds of the fanbase that the end product can be fluid. A final factor would be the increasing relevance of social networking, blogging, etc. as a force… In a sense, BioWare is feeling the same weight the Egyptian government did. I’m not convinced that BioWare would lose their artistic integrity by changing their ending to account for a very strong input by their fanbase, any more than their integrity was compromised by trying to shoehorn an ending into a very tight pre-set delivery schedule and perhaps pressure from corporate to make the ending amenable to additional revenue via DLC. What is remarkable is that they actually do have a chance to amend what is by most accounts an unsatisfactory ending to an excellent game. With any luck we’ll all be the better off for them giving it another go—except of course the producers who will be out the costs of producing the DLC—buying back consumer goodwill rather than using those resources to produce the planned for-cost content.

What they all seem to ignore, it is not the artist who decides his work is an art, the consumers do. And consumers made a clear statement, up to the last ~10 mins it is an art, then it became garbage.

But even if you agree with the statement ME being art, it is an art made for masses, not 5% elite. And as such it fails badly. It is clear violation of readers-writer contract, when you start to play Mass Effect you starts to create some expectations, how the story will develop and how it possible ends.

The story of Shepard is a very conventional “bigger then life goddam hero” story. And all those years human cultural development have thought us one thing, those stories ends always (more or less) the same.

“I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”

And nothing, absolutely nothing have prepared us for the story twist BioWare presented in the end.

There is nothing wrong with a twist, but a good twist is very hard to achieve, you have to build your whole story planning for that twist, so if the consumer (viewer/reader/player) finally reaches the point he/she can “look” back and realize what everything actually lead to this. This is sadly not the case with ME3, nothing in all those 100 hours have lead to the kind of ending we’ve got presented. A lot of it even directly contradicts the idea presented in the ending.

So yes, maybe ME is an art, but the end of it isn’t. And it has to be changed if we ever suppose to trust BioWare. Why is it important? Because the story of ME deserves better, because this story must survive time and finally became true and timeless art. With the ending like this it will vanish into nowhere only to be remembered as failure.

The majority of “professional reviewers” commenting on this controversy are not taking all the facts into consideration and are basing their criticism on one point only: Happy endings. That is where they fail. There are so many arguments about the plot holes and inconsistencies brought up with the endings that the reviewers do not bother to examine, but the loyal fans/customers who have “invested” in ME franchise, know them and point them out. Just as they did with the novel “Mass Effect: Deception” where Bioware stated that they will rewrite it, after the fan rage. But the reviewers are following the easy -and not time consuming- way out of this, because they want to get a few more easy clicks, and what they do not understand they call it “Artistic Integrity”. When you approach to analyze a problem, you have to find the all reasons that made this problem appear in the first place, and then have an opinion about it.

^ you sir are correct 100%. Its not that everyone wants the old fashioned “happy ending” they just want endings based on their choices; not just three of the same endings. They have should’ve provided a “we lose, everthing goes to sh**t ending” and also a happy ending including multiple endings in between and each of these are based on your choices in the games. These reporters and such don’t understand why we are disappointed about the endings. They need to actually research first before talking out.

The plot holes/etc. in the ending are likely because the ending was a hallucination. Read up on the indoctrination theory. Based on the comments from Bioware, including the latest comment hinting to “clarification” it seems unlikely they are looking to replace the ending but rather to add something onto it, and more than likely this was in the plans from the outset.

Bioware underestimated the amount of anger there would be I think, but if the ending is truly a meta-ending I think it’s great. It’s just a question of whether that’s the case or not, and you can find the evidence for indoctrination theory in a lot of places now.

Still, if this theory is true -i do not think it is- that is another argument against those “professional reviewers”. It proves my point that they havent done their “homework” before start bashing all those customers that disliked those endings. Plus Bioware should have hinted the indoctrination possibility, they did talk about closure before the game’s launch. My opinion is that the last ten minutes of ME3 is a result of bad writing with the attempt to make a memorable plot twist to impress the player. We all saw how this worked. As for the clarification statement, that was forced made after the huge outcry of their fanbase.

I disagree. Yes, you do have to take into account all the facts to make an educated opinion, but I don’t think any of the facts your referencing are relevant to the point reviewers like him are making. They, generally, don’t care if the ending was good or bad, that’s inconsequential. What does matter to them is that some of the more vocal critics are bullying Bioware into changing the ending to a piece of art they created. Even the most positive aspect, the charity, was abused by the fan base as a whole. If changing the ending is a collaborative experience, that’s great. But if Bioware truly is proud of the ending they have, and want to keep it, they have every right to do so and shouldn’t cave to pressure. Artists choose how they work, some choose collaboration and that’s great, others don’t, but they should never be bullied into one way or the other.

Personally, I think most of the “plot holes” people talk about are exactly why the ending is so good, but that’s a different soapbox…

That’s just the thing, Paul. If they are proud of the ending they have – and I would say that’s a big “if” when speaking about Bioware as a whole – they won’t change it. They won’t cave to the pressure. If they decide that what they wanted is more important than what the people playing the games expected, so be it. There’s no pressure involved other than making our discontent heard. Nobody’s putting a gun to their head, nobody’s physically forcing them to do anything. The message, as it is, basically says “tens of thousands of your fans hated the ending enough to make their discontent heard” (and make no mistake, there’s far more people hating it just as much and simply not bothering to post or wait for a fix). Despite that, though, despite hating it so much, people are willing to give them another chance. We didn’t up and left, we didn’t abandon them. We’re willing to keep buying their games if they fix this mess and acknowledge that one man’s vision might be blurred at times. This isn’t bullying them into doing anything. This is actually a confidence vote more than anything else. This is saying “We know you can do better than that” instead of “Screw it, I’m done with you”.